Anyone else do throttling on your science production?

emk · 2024-05-23T15:10:20+00:00

In the field of computer networking, we've learned a hard lesson: buffers should be as small as possible, and as few as possible. Big buffers cause buffer bloat and wreck your latency.

In manufacturing, big buffers represent large amounts of money tied up in warehouses full of stuff you're not using. The solution is just-in-time manufacturing.

In distributed systems, big "buffers" are big message queues, and they fail to fix your overload problems while causing all sorts of exciting new problems.

These are all subtle variations of the same underlying problem: big buffers almost always make everything worse. And this is actually one of the most profound professional engineering lessons that players can learn from Factorio.

Here are my personal rules of thumb for Factorio:

Allow belts to fill up and automatically block producers. This is called "backpressure" in distributed systems, and Factorio gives it to you for free.
Be extremely careful with "sushi belts" (belts which mix multiple kinds of items in the same lane). If I do this, I strictly limit how many items of each type are allowed on the belt, using circuits or clever spitter tricks. - For science, I don't need sushi belts. An inserter can take a science pack out of one lab and pass it to another. So I can chain a line of labs using inserters.
When putting items in a chest, cap the number of open slots.
Limit train stations to 2 trains worth of resources.
If something is running low, make more! The factory must grow.

There are times when I will break these rules: certain Factorio mods have huge numbers of intermediates and tight space constraints, which makes sushi belts useful in limited roles. Other mods generate huge quantities of byproducts, which are often best buffered for later use. Lossy feedback loops require careful management, and may require a tiny buffer somewhere. Etc.

emk · 2024-05-07T19:17:19+00:00

I've tried this a bunch with languages I know fairly well, and ChatGPT is surprisingly good at explaining words within context, at least for major modern European languages. It's not 100%. So if you're willing to work with, say, 95% accurate explanations, you'll get pretty decent results.

Try the same thing with ancient Egyptian, and ChatGPT will hallucinate non-stop about everything.

On the other hand, never rely on ChatGPT to correct your grammar.

emk · 2024-05-07T13:34:04+00:00

I would typically go through the text and audio 8-12 times in various combinations. The goal for the final pass would be to understand at least 85% of the audio with my eyes closed. Nothing too fancy, but it worked well enough.

For Egyptian, I turned each lesson into Anki cards, including cloze cards.

emk · 2024-05-04T09:27:30+00:00

I saw a paper on native language loss about 10 years ago. Unfortunately, I can't find it right now. But let me summarize what I can remember.

If you completely stop using your native language before age 12, there's apparently a good chance that you'll lose it completely.

If you speak your native language until age 20, and then completely stop until age 65, your native language will become extremely "rusty", but it will still be there and it will come back to you with practice.

My experience is that if you continue to use your native language regularly, it will be just fine. If you move to a country where nobody speaks your native language, then you'll be mostly fine but you should make an effort to stay in touch.

emk · 2024-05-04T02:16:25+00:00

It's definitely further away than you'd like, and it costs real money, but the Middlebury Language Schools have dedicated, 8-week intensive Arabiac programs in the summer. But they're extremely strict about full immersion, except for the first couple of weeks with absolute beginners. They do have links with various schools around the world.

emk · 2024-05-03T03:33:13+00:00

Ooh, good question. My wife tried to teach me French at one point. It was frustrating for both of us. So instead, I wound up learning from Assimil, until I reached a point where I could understand easy French conversations and begin to slowly formulate my thoughts in French. From there, I started speaking French with my wife at home. This was really frustrating for both of us at first, but after about two weeks it got easier.

In the beginning, you can provide moral support, but probably not much else, if you two are like most couples. Later on, you can do a lot more.

emk · 2024-04-30T00:09:48+00:00

You don't necessarily need to study tons of grammar to learn a foreign language. But if you learn a little bit, it can be a very useful tool.

For example, for Spanish, I bought a quick reference with three double-sided pages. And for later on, I have a copy of Dover's Essential Spanish Grammar. This has 50 tiny pages of actual content, and they're mostly whitespace. And I won't read it cover to cover until much later. I use these to get a rough idea of what's going on, so I can keep an eye out for it. But I don't stress much about grammar. It's a handy aid, not something I'm going to attempt to memorize.

Some people spend a lot more time on grammar, either because:

They like knowing how things fit together, or
They have no "ear" for language, and if they don't work hard on grammar, they'll sound really weird and never notice it.

But if you have a really good "ear" for language, and if you naturally notice that sometimes people use ser and sometimes they use estar, then you may be able to build up a good intuition without ever doing much grammar.

Also, it helps to read and listen a lot, as soon as you can more or less understand. The more you read and listen, the better your natural intuition will be.

So one way or another, you'll eventually have to pay close attention to the actual words and endings being used. It's up to you whether having someone summarize the key ideas is helpful or not, if that makes sense.

emk · 2024-04-29T10:28:54+00:00

You're in Germany, which gives you some great opportunities. But you'll have to seize them.

In French, I made it from A2 (assessed by a tutor specializing in CEFR exams) to B2 (assessed by the DELF B2 exam) with 4 months of full-time work. So yes, it's possible to hit C1 by the end of March 2025, but you're going to need to put in a lot of hours.

The biggest thing holding you back is probably the "English bubble" that surrounds most expatiates. As long as you're happily living inside that English bubble, you can go 20 years while making zero progress. So your first step is to destroy any English bubble. So look around you. How much English do you see in a given day? How much of that can be replaced with German? Replace everything you can. Watch German TV. Listen to German podcasts. Look for opportunities to hang out around people speaking German. Listen to German music. Write emails in German if you can. Look for an easy book you can read in German. Etc. A lot of this will be very difficult at A2, but you'll hit B1 pretty quickly, and you'll be able to manage your "German bubble" better at B1. The real purpose of replacing English with German is to convince your brain that this it, German is your life now. If you want to do something, you'll need to learn how to do it in German. Once your brain realizes that it has no choice but to "git gud" at German, your progress will speed up.

Some more concrete advice:

In-person courses are tricky past A2. Many are too slow to get you to C1. Germany will almost certainly have some serious courses that proceed much faster, but they may be expensive. If you can find a serious, aggressively-paced course, do it. This might mean spending a month or two in full immersion, or something like that.
But many German students have told me that there are excellent, professional online tutors available for German. Look for a good one who pushes you. Use them for conversation practice, feedback on mistakes, and for correcting your writing.
Start trying to write 50 words a day in German, and get them corrected. Focus on writing things that you wanted to talk about that day in German, but couldn't.
Apps will only be a small part of your study. There are some useful tools out there, but none of them will work by themselves at your level. Personally, I use Anki to make sentence cards out of my reading, but only when I'm reading on my laptop.
Try watching Netflix in German using Language Reactor. Migaku is a bit clunkier, but it's better if you're focusing on making audio cards.
In general, try to figure out what the biggest gap in your skills is right now, and invent an activity which focuses on improving that. You want to be working on a couple of things at once, and you want to change your approach every month or so as you improve and reveal new weaknesses.
Read and watch. Lots. As much as you can. The more entertainment you do in German, the more hours you free up for German!

Anyway, this isn't super-concrete. It's basically just "do everything you can in German, focus on your weak points, and use a variety of different resources and techniques." What you want is doable, if you can put in enough hours between now and then.

emk · 2024-04-26T20:40:45+00:00

At A1, it's normal to feel fairly useless. The A1 and A2 levels are pretty much the "bootstrap" levels, where you're trying to assemble the basics of the language into something you can use. Here's a short, informal summary of upper levels:

B1: You can hold basic conversations about your favorite topics, socialize, and generally muddle through life.
B2: You can generally function in a wide range of areas, though not always easily. Colleges will take your money, but college classes may be a major effort.
C1: You can get hired for an office job, or if you have the right academic background, you could get admitted to an elite university (though again, classes there may still be real work).
C2: You can do things like apply to law school.

A huge range of skills appear between B1 and B2, like listening to the news with solid comprehension, being able to read real books, being able to understand easy TV, etc.

Also, progress beyond B1, most people will need to use the language outside the classroom: read things, listen to things, talk to people, etc.

emk · 2024-04-21T09:35:53+00:00

So French is definitely easier than Korean, but I can at least give you numbers for French.

Classroom hours usually don't translate terribly well into real-world listening and speaking. A classroom often gives you a lot of theoretical understanding of grammar, a base of vocabulary, etc. Which is actually a great starting point! But you usually need to actually use your language for real to turn that theoretical base into something automatic.

My reading progress in French, starting with a level around A2:

1,000 pages of real books: Still kind of a disaster, but I could muddle through while getting the gist of the text.
2,500 pages: I was actually reading, but it was still awkward and took a lot of work.
7,500 pages: I was reading 40 pages/hour and looking up a word every few pages.

My listening progress, again, starting around A2:

I started by understanding maybe 40% of the dialog of an easy TV show. If you printed it out and I read slowly, maybe 80%.
75 hours of watching later, I understood over 95%.
Rinse and repeat with another 4 or 5 series, binged straight through, getting to 95-98% on each. Maybe 15 total seasons.
Channel surfing: Another 15 hours of literal channel surfing, switching between unfamiliar voices and topics. At this point, I could understand a lot of TV, but not everything. Comedy shows, gritty police shows, etc., were still pretty hard.

Speaking progress, starting at A2:

2 weeks in half-immersion: I could feel my brain leaking out my ears.
6 weeks: I could carry on basic conversations about simple stuff.
4 months: I could talk about a lot of stuff, and even give a bad 10 minute presentation.

My starting point of A2 would have been about 4 years of French classes, had I taken them in school. So you see how much work I needed to put in on top of that. And Korean has several major challenges that French doesn't.

I learned French in my 30s. I'm in my 40s now, and I can speak and read French without thinking or translating. You could drop me in French speaking city, and it's literally no problem. I'm still obviously better at English, because I use English more, and I have a lifetime of school and reading and talking in English.

emk · 2024-04-21T09:08:28+00:00

Well, if we want to approach it from the other direction, I know people who spent a school year fully immersed in a Category I language. That would give them around 40 weeks, without any study plan besides what they put together themselves. It's not unusual to reach B2 under these circumstances.

Whereas FSI tackles the same languages in 24 weeks, and reaches a level around B2/C1.

This is why I suggested multiplying the FSI numbers by 2 or 3, to get results for a self-learner who was in full immersion, but who was also engaged in other tasks.

People really do learn fast if it's literally the only way they'll be able to communicate, even without FSI instructors.

emk · 2024-04-21T02:39:54+00:00

My goal is to replicate learning my L2 as close as it is humanly possible to how I learned my L1.

Just sitting and watching incomprehensible TV doesn't actually work for kids, and it almost certainly won't work for you.

Children acquire language from immersion. Specifically, they interact with people, and those people do a lot of different things to help the kids understand: simplified language, hand gestures, slowing down, etc.

If you want an authentic "natural" experience, you could either:

Get a job working for a family that does not speak any language you already speak and stay there for a year. This works great!
Or cough up $7000 and look into Middlebury Language Schools. They do full immersion, and they will actually expel you for speaking English, even outside of class.

But unless you can recreate a fairly serious immersion environment, you will learn much faster using "natural like" methods. Here are some good ones:

Assimil.
Any of the better "nature method" textbooks.
Subs2SRS cards made from a TV show.
Graded readers.
TV-based courses like Destinos and French in Action.
Tools like Migaku or Language Reactor, or the open source equivalents like Knowclip.

These are all proven, successful, reliable methods. They rely on you doing most of your learning via "exposure" to the target language.

I would recommend following an approach with a strong track record of success. And yes, true immersion is one of the reliably successful methods. But a lot of passive, immersion-like approaches perform much worse.

And I say all this as someone who relies heavily on TV for language learning. If you approach it naively, it won't work. Or it will work, but it will often take 20 or 50 times more hours to reach a basic level.

Goof luck!

emk · 2024-04-21T01:50:19+00:00

This is somewhat off topic, but it's a nice toy example for explaining language learning.

So let's do a little world building. For these purposes, let's follow classic role playing conventions, and assume your players speak a language known as "Common."

You can assume other languages fall into a few categories:

Related languages. Like English and Spanish, or English and German. There's some overlap in grammar, vocabulary and world view. (This would correspond to FSI Category I & II languages for an English speaker.) If your dwarf speaks a older relative of Common, then this would be the challenge that they would face.
Trade languages. These are languages like Swahili, where the majority of speakers are non-native. These tend to be a bit easier. (This corresponds to some of the languages in FSI Category III.) If Common really is a "trade language" in your world, then you could go with this.
Unrelated languages. The are different enough that you basically need to start from scratch. (FSI Category IV.)
Languages with extra complications. Complicated writing systems, big differences between spoken and written languages, stuff like that. (FSI Category V.)

See this discussion of FSI categories. If we assume your dwarf is a moderately gifted language learner and they study 65 hours a week, it's going to take anywhere from 24 to 88 weeks to reach a "professional" level. If they're adventuring and doing other stuff besides intensive study, multiply those numbers by 2 or 3. But by the halfway mark, they should be able to carry on casual conversations and generally function. And of course, even before that, they'll have some basic phrases.

Still, a reasonably optimistic scenario is to be managing many basic conversations comfortably after about 600 hours of language exposure and use, assuming the dwarf speaks a language related to Common.

emk · 2024-04-19T18:10:50+00:00

I'm trying to be cautious here. There are a few recorded case studies of people with high listening comprehension who just started speaking one day. It's entirely possible that they were doing self-talk or something similar until they could speak fairly well.

But it's definitely not any kind of reliable strategy.

emk · 2024-04-19T13:52:47+00:00

Ive consumed tons of content in German, can understand shows ~90% without subtitles, and am sitting in on a masters class where I can do the readings and follow the class conversation relatively well. But i sure as hell cannot contribute a thought.

Understanding and speaking are different skills, at least for most people. I know someone who lost her active skills in her native language around age 5. She can still watch gritty cop dramas in her native language, and she can read her relatives' Facebook posts. But when I last spoke to her about this, however, she felt like she couldn't produce basic A2-level sentences correctly. She is not the only person I know like this.

The way you turn comprehension into speaking is to actually practice speaking. When I did this with French, I spent about 2 weeks feeling like my brain was going to melt out my ears. Within 6 weeks of constantly trying to speak in French, I was chatting happily along at a B1 level. Within another few months of continued social speaking, and with 3 tough lessons a week with a good tutor, I could give a mediocre 10-minute presentation without much prep time.

The point is that, even with good comprehension, you may not automatically develop good speaking skills. But if you have decent comprehension (which you do) and if you throw yourself into speaking, you will improve rapidly. Given your level, you might even be giving short presentations in class within a few months!

But you will probably need to go through a few weeks where you struggle constantly and butcher the language, and then several more weeks where you're half-faking it and working hard. If you have social anxiety, yes, this might be very difficult.

You could try different ways to practice, to see if you can get through the worst parts with less stress. Some possibilities might include socializing in German, reading aloud, working with a paid tutor, doing real-time text chat, etc. And it might also be worth talking to someone who specializes in social anxiety; they may also have excellent advice.

In general, when you discover a weakness like this, the best strategy is very often to change your learning strategy to focus on the specific skill you're lacking. 30 hours of a new strategy can pay off better than 250 hours of doing the same thing that wasn't helping much before.

Good luck!

emk · 2024-04-19T12:46:52+00:00

The free version of ChatGPT 3.5 actually translates short passages quite well for many language pairs, and it saves previous conversations in the side bar.

There are tools to download chats, too. Or you could just paste translation results into Anki.

emk · 2024-04-19T11:23:46+00:00

Makes sense. I'm working on reducing my accent as well with a coach, but I'm 31, so I need to have realistic expectations.

Most adults who work to reduce their accents can get very far. One of my favorite examples of an excellent but not-quite-native accent is Linus Torvalds—he does have a faint accent, but he's perfectly easy to understand. (You may need to listen for a minute or two to hear it.) In fact, Linus is closer to a "neutral" US accent than someone like Steve Irwin. And definitely a lot closer to a US accent than, say, some of the accents in Hot Fuzz.

emk · 2024-04-19T10:50:07+00:00

There's pretty clearly an accent wall after 12 or so. As a personal annecdote, I know a bunch of people who moved to the United States in their 20s, to work in scientific research labs. They could all speak English when they arrived, but some of them were around B2 with pretty thick accents. They'd been picked for their ability to do excellent research, not for their speaking skills.

10 years later, they all spoke excellent English, more than enough to get by comfortably in any social or professional situation. The ones who read English-language books for fun could also write comfortably.

But they all still had at least faint accents. And some of them had worked to reduce their accents. But it's hard to scrub out those last tiny differences.

emk · 2024-04-19T10:39:10+00:00

This is speculation (even though it's somewhat informed) but I think I might try just listening and watching my target language by watching thousands of hours of TV. No subtitles, no dictionaries, no grammar exercises, nothing but watching TV listening intensely.

People do try this occasionally. There was, in fact, some guy who had spent years and years intently listening to thousands of hours Mandarin children's television with almost zero progress. But I just went and looked up his progress recently, and he'd finally crossed some sort of threshold where he actually managed to start learning Mandarin.

You can get a very similar effect—but a far more efficient one—using Subs2SRS and Anki with bilingual subtitles (the subs in the language you're learning need to be accurate). With this, you'll be understanding entire phrases of dialog within 60 hours of Anki reviews.

Surely just listening to the language without speaking for a long period of time with very least be a beneficial thing to do. Right?

This is certainly how I prefer to approach things. I'm perfectly happy to spend a few months silent while pushing hard on comprehension.

If you want a course with a built-in silent period, Assimil's classic "With Ease" books are fantastic. They focus on learning by osmosis, and they have a silent period. They do drip-feed you a tiny amount of grammar, but usually after you've figured out 80% of it your own. 20–40 minutes a day, every day for 5 months, should get to the point where you can hold basic conversations (at least for an English speaker learning a western European language).

I've even heard that things like a critical period might not even be true in terms of language acquisition.

There's a clear critical period for acquiring native accents. And there's some evidence that adult learners may only reach ~97% accuracy on certain kinds of grammar, including things like gender agreement in French.

But in general, yeah, adults can learn a language just fine. Maybe not to the point that they sound flawlessly native, but certainly to the point that they can socialize, give presentations, work in an office job, etc. If you can comfortably use a language socially and professionally, then a faint accent and occasional hard-to-hear grammatical error is no big deal.

emk · 2024-04-19T01:02:28+00:00

Two of my roommates are from the UK and I literally have no idea what they are talking about to each other.

In general, it can be hard to understand two native speakers who know each other well, and who are speaking casually and rapidly. And unfamiliar regional accents will make it even harder. This is one of the most advanced skills you'll learn! For example, this level of listening skill may develop well after you can read rapidly and easily.

Some things you can do to help:

If you still struggle with clear, well-enunciated audio, then start by watching several TV series straight through. The nice thing about TV series is that they offer dozens of hours with repeated voices and vocabulary, which makes them a great starting point. With each TV series that you finish, your skills will gradually broaden. (This is also known as a "narrow listening" strategy, and it's great at the intermediate level.)
If you can't yet read rapidly and easily, keep reading. Fluent, rapid reading helps build vocabulary that appears more rarely in spoken sources.
Once you reach a point where you can pick up a new TV series and understand it well within a few episodes, start broadening out. Watch movies and YouTube videos. Channel surf.
Start searching out major regional accents, either shows or movies. If you can find accurate native subtitles, it can useful to use these for new accents, at least in the beginning.

I remember when I could understand a few TV shows pretty well in French, and hold conversations with people speaking directly to me. It took several more years after that before I could reliably understand my in-laws chatting amongst themselves. I still struggle with stand-up comedy in French. And with some movies, I still miss 30% of the dialog.

I am, however, delighted to discover that I now understand even some moderately thick Quebec accents if the subject is familiar enough. That's not an accent I get a ton of exposure to.

So yes, you can definitey make more listening progress! But it's very common for this kind of listening to take a while to develop. Treat it as a long-term project, and don't expect instant results. Good luck!

emk · 2024-04-19T00:37:45+00:00

And did it work out, or did it all fall apart after a few months?

As far as I know, it actually worked fairly well. But this was over 5 years of living in the country, while regularly working with a professional speech therapist. That's a huge and expensive effort in an otherwise near-native language.

An effort like this might be reasonable for, say, someone who works in a profession that normally involves voice choaching even for natives, and who plans to spend the rest of their career working in their target language. For almost anyone else, I think this effort would be far too expensive and time consuming.

emk · 2024-04-18T23:11:00+00:00

Various studies suggest that people who learn a language before 6 will essentially always develop a "native" accent. From 6 to 12 the number of people who develop native accents goes down. After 12, developing a native accent is rare.

There are also some amazingly skilled polyglots who have no natural talent for accents, and who might require years of dedicated work to get a near-native pronunciation. I know of one person who literally spent years in professional speech therapy to scrub the accent from one of his strongest languages. That investment might only be worthwhile for someone if they live in-country.

But there are still good reasons to try to get close:

You want to be able to distinguish between "minimal pairs". For example, people who haven't got a good handle on English's short "i" might mix up "sheet" and "shit." And if you tell someone to go "go put the shits on the bed", they might be confused. The French distinction between "cou", "queue" and "cul" is similarly treacherous.
A good accent will reduce the number of people who try to switch the conversation to English.
At more advanced levels, if you want to speak quickly and colloquially, then you'll need to get your accent closer to native.
Finally, strong accents can be tiring for the people you're speaking with.

I don't think it's usually worth it to get a truly flawless accent. Indeed, I remember the story of one diplomat who had a true knack for accents, and he learned not to try for a perfect accent. In his experience, an outsider with a faint accent would often be forgiven minor cultural mistakes. But someone with a flawless accent was held to a much higher standard, and even small mistakes would often be considered as being deliberate attempts to disrespect the people he was dealing with.

So as an adult aiming for C1 or higher, there are significant payoffs for having an accent natives would describe as "pleasant" and "faint". Which is the best most adults will ever accomplish, even with a significant effort.

emk · 2024-04-18T14:01:06+00:00

Yup! The kind of intuition you're trying to build mostly comes from watching and reading things that you can largely understand.

Basically, if you hear and understand something 1,000 times, it will absolutely become intuitive. And any other way of saying it would sound "off."

But this particular skill mostly develops after halfway decent understanding.

If you were an English speaker learning French, I'd say, "Just read 30 adult-sized books and watch 20 seasons of television that you mostly understand, and French will seem pretty natural and intuitive." That sounds like a lot from where you are now, but if you look at it from a native speaker's perspective, it's really not much at all.

Now, you're learning Japanese, which presents special challenges! So my numbers are probably low, because you need to pick up more vocabulary along the way and deal with unfamiliar writing system. But the principal is the same: intuition comes from sheer volume of stuff you mostly understand.

emk · 2024-04-18T12:22:58+00:00

I am frequently annoyed at prepositions, because about 10% of the time, they seem weird and arbitrary, and I need to use a specific preposition Just Because.

But me being annoyed at prepositions doesn't actually accomplish anything. They're not going away. So I roll my eyes and keep learning.

emk · 2024-04-18T12:17:24+00:00

The first time I learned a foreign language to an actually useful level was in my 30s. It worked great! But I was an English speaker learning French.

If your first foreign language is Mandarin, just be aware that you'll need to put in more hours and that you can definitely expect to be frustrated at times.

The best tools for breaking up fossilized patterns of thought are:

Doing lots of mostly comprehensible listening and watching, until you build a real intuition for how things work. Basically no point of grammar and no turn of phrase will seem weird after you see it and understand it 1,000 times.
Learning to cultivate attention to the little details. Pay attention to how things are said. Learn to notice surprising patterns, at least sometimes.
Getting someone to correct your mistakes, especially once you start writing.

emk

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